


Residual Posion

by kaitain



Category: Dune - All Media Types, Dune Series - Frank Herbert
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 07:58:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3843163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaitain/pseuds/kaitain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Piter's smile always shows too many teeth — all the better to bite his tongue with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Residual Posion

**Author's Note:**

> the original bare bones draft for this little piece was considerably shorter and also over a year and a half old! i glanced at it again today and decided out of the blue to rework it, because i haven't posted anything in way, way too long. i need to get my groove back! apparently i'm doing so with incredibly dense explicatory character study prose. piter just brings it out in me.
> 
> come one come all to the sideshow attraction that is piter's wealth of cleverly hidden (and many not-so-hidden) vulnerabilities. also, i am firmly, firmly of the belief that piter modeled residual poison after his own spice addiction.

The body is an unruly thing. For all his control, his awareness of every twitch of muscle, every sneer and every reptilian blink, Piter cannot secure an immaculate mask over all of his tells. His masks are known to crack, at times, and the smallest things slip through those little fissures: the instinctive clench of his throat, the tip of his tongue pressing to his palate to silence itself, the subtlest quiver of defiant eyes. Piter knows that his Baron can read it all for what it is, and that is the subtlest trace of fear, of fury. That, more than anything, is what he hates— the moment in which he slips, for only a second, and his foibles are put on display. 

That he should be under scrutiny every moment is to be expected, but it chafes him nonetheless. Spider-black eyes search him and scour him, yet Piter returns each and every gaze eye-to-eye, his blue stare inscrutable, rife with the soured ichor of Arrakis. He smiles a slow-spreading threat of a smile that chills his face, offsets the sharp angles of his jaw and nose. It is a delicate curvature, not unlike the form of a kindjal, pulling his thin lips into a tight, jeering line. Only the twinkling in his nightmare eyes betrays him, and for that moment he is bleak and striking as a clot of night sky.

Those precious, jarring moments of emotion— they are so dangerous, but so thrilling. The body and mind of a Mentat are well-trained, but they tremble with human emotion all the same, never free of their truest impulses. Thus concealment becomes a necessity, an aide to augment conditioning.

To complement Piter's wide array of masks is a wide array of smiles. His broader smiles are white and wide, pearls set in a void. Behind his teeth, his serpent tongue lays momentarily dormant, a cobra ever-poised to strike. Piter's joyful smiles always show too many teeth, but his joy is explosive, infectious; his passion is a poison in itself, and he takes pride in this.

Piter's lungs are always full of the sort of breath with which to sing, and his speech emerges measured, though melodic. "Allow me this moment, my lord!" he cries, laughing sometimes with a silky chuckle and sometimes with the clever, caustic tone of shattering glass.The Baron, generously or grudgingly, depending on his mood, grants his clemency. Sometimes, they laugh together. It is a sound that the servants fear.

Other times, oftentimes, Piter must bite his tongue. Privately, he fears that he has become timid— domesticated, the housepet of a Great House. In his formative years, he thinks that he was never so careful in word and in deed; but, then again, to be too bold is to succumb to the most childish folly. Piter is no longer a child. He will appear merely fifty or sixty when he is nearly one hundred— but that does not matter. He will not live to one hundred. He will not live to fifty-five. _C'est la vie,_ as the saying goes.

He has learned what suits him. He has learned what liberties he may take. He can see when not to press the Baron; he knows when he must halt and retreat briefly to silence. But, always, he has some retort manufactured, some bright infuriating chirp to offer when the time is right, and he takes pleasure in it. Piter appreciates every vindictive pleasure he can capture in his talons.

The last twenty years have wrought hell into his very bones, but that is not what he reviles. He displays his twisting proudly when he must. They may call him what they wish, myriad Landsraad voices spitting _Harkonnen animal_ and _creature_ and whatever his title may be in the savage tongue of the desert scum, but he is pleased to be a force to be reckoned with. A nebulous hell has always been within him; he has always been bound to some nether-world, and he welcomes its foulness with his slender arms spread wide as a harpy’s wings to accommodate it all.

Though his stature is hardly that of the Beast's, it is no ordeal to draw himself up as a tall, imposing shadow. He towers ever higher with each bitter epithet from meaningless richece lips. Those that speak against him know nothing of his vulnerabilities, and that is delicious, fulfilling to him—they have never seen him sullen and hurt, lips twisting, jaw clenched, hands twitching for want of flesh to rend, each cord of muscle and sinew in him coiled and hateful. They know him only as a face to be feared, a man not to be trifled with. Their acrimony is a boon—they hear his name and their minds conjure up his eyes and all the blood he has spilled—and that is enough. They seek to shame him for the things he takes pride in, and he merely laughs.

His Baron, as well, enjoys critiquing him. He reminds Piter from time to time that he is disgusting. Piter's curious predilection for suffering, he says, is revolting; it is unnecessary sadism. And Piter only smiles indulgently, a bright laugh bubbling up before dying in his chest as he thinks that his dearest master is unwise to fear what he does not know. He may think he knows, yes, but he is ignorant—Piter reminds himself of this often, assuring himself that only he knows his warped soul for what it is. Only he may know himself completely, no matter what others may think they have glimpsed. But he knows this as well: the Baron has glimpsed too much.

It could not be helped.

The Baron has seen fear, seen it in the bluest-blue eyes and heard it warbling thinly, childishly in the voice that is usually so trained, so cold. It is humiliating. It turns Piter’s stomach and keeps him from peace and rest; it makes his mind twitch and squirm to know that, yet again, he has been stripped of dignity to keep from being stripped of life.

In his youth, he did not yet understand when to cower and when to jump, and now, grown into a lapdog, he fears that he does it all too eagerly— but he could never bring himself to hate himself for it, when Piter is all that Piter has left.

He hates the Baron instead, bitterly. He despises him for what he has taken from him and for what he has given to him— for the addiction he must reclaim.

The poison is an insidious thing. Piter de Vries has made it in his image. All of the subject's control, their awareness, is compromised by its administration: and, if he so wishes it, the subject will always know to whom they defer for the antidote. Tasteless, odorless, colorless, it will never betray itself, but he will see their tells all the same in the thrum of permanently-tainted blood.

The absence of a thing— air, water, an antidote— can be as perilous as the presence of another. But the clever toxicologist knows that there exists a substance playing at both poison and antidote: it bursts on his tongue and dilates his inkstain pupils nightly, a regular part of his diet, a measured dose to hold off the crude, groping hands of withdrawal.

The poison is an insidious thing indeed, and Piter smiles to think of it— a joyful smile, a seething, unruly grin.


End file.
